| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Middlemarch by George Eliot: the same people. I often offend in something of the same way;
I am apt to speak too strongly of those who don't please me."
In spite of this magnanimity Dorothea was still smarting: perhaps as
much from Celia's subdued astonishment as from her small criticisms.
Of course all the world round Tipton would be out of sympathy
with this marriage. Dorothea knew of no one who thought as she
did about life and its best objects.
Nevertheless before the evening was at an end she was very happy.
In an hour's tete-a-tete with Mr. Casaubon she talked to him
with more freedom than she had ever felt before, even pouring
out her joy at the thought of devoting herself to him, and of
Middlemarch |
The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: alive the opposition of two schemes simultaneously followed;
to keep them notably apart, though still coincident; and to
balance them with such judicial nicety before the reader,
that neither shall be unperceived and neither signally
prevail.
The rule of rhythm in prose is not so intricate. Here, too,
we write in groups, or phrases, as I prefer to call them, for
the prose phrase is greatly longer and is much more
nonchalantly uttered than the group in verse; so that not
only is there a greater interval of continuous sound between
the pauses, but, for that very reason, word is linked more
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